"The Republicans will never give up their voting machines,"
said a top Republican party official to Charlie Matulka, the Democratic
candidate for the U.S. Senate seat in Nebraska. This statement was in response
to Charlie's very public protest against the conflict-of-interest inherent in
the candidacy of Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE). Hagel has held top executive
positions (and still has investments) in companies that owned the machines that
counted the vote in Nebraska this election and last.

Republicans dominate the voting machine business. So, I
expected the Republicans to take back the Senate... amid reports of voting
machine "irregularities" in several states and polling results that
didn't come close to election outcomes.And with billions of dollars at stake, who could resist the temptation
to tweak results? It's duck soup.

Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, the nation's leading expert in
voting machine technology, says, "Any programmer can write code that
displays one thing on a screen, records something else, and prints yet another
result." But they do make mistakes as we know from the multitude of
reports in this election and past ones. Dr. Mercuri's real fear is that one day
the "irregularities" will go away, as programmers learn their
clandestine craft all too well.

Then how can we tell if the "fix was in?"An examination of exit polling and
pre-election polling versus election results could raise a few red flags.

We can't use Voter News Service (VNS) this year. VNS is a
top-secret private consortium owned by ABC News, The
Associated Press, CBS News, CNN, Fox
News, and NBC News that has "projected"
election night winners since 1964. VNS collapsed camp on election day due to
technical problems... they said. Or was it the glare of publicity since the
2000 presidential election that brought the charade to an end? Questions have
been raised since its inception, that VNS was a cover for election day vote
rigging or other shenanigans. And it was strange that when VNS management made
its announcement on Tuesday, they didn't make a big deal over how the shutdown
affected the 64,000 temporary employees they claim they hired for this
election.

Anyway, that leaves us with pre-election polling to
ponder. An intensive effort to review and interpret that data is currently
underway by Bev Harris and her staff at Talion.com.

Meanwhile, I called John Zogby of the highly respected
Zogby International. I asked him if over the years he had noticed increased
variation between pre-election predictions and election results.Zogby said that he didn't notice any big
problems until this year. Things were very different this time.

"I blew Illinois. I blew Colorado (and Georgia). And
never in my life did I get New Hampshire wrong...but I blew that too." Or
did he?

This year might instead be a repeat of the 2000
presidential election, when the polls accurately predicted the winner (Gore),
but the voting system in Florida collapsed under the weight of voting machine
failure, election day chicanery, and outright disenfranchisement of thousands
of black voters by Republican state officials.

And for those who believed that the new election reform
law does anything to protect the security of your vote...think again. The
federal standards to be developed and implemented as a result of the new law
will be VOLUNTARY. What Congress really did was to throw $2.65 billion dollars
at the states, so that they could lavish it on a handful of private companies
that are controlled by ultra-conservative Republicans, foreigners, and felons.

Let's take a moment to look back rather than forward. In
the last several decades the rich have gotten richer and the poor poorer. This
is not a formula for a conservative groundswell. Yet both conservative
Democrats and right wing Republicans have long enjoyed success at the polls.
While, most of Europe still uses paper ballots, voting machines have been in
America since 1889. The use of computers in voting technology began around
1964. Today, less than 2% of the American electorate use hand-counted paper
ballots.

The question is...have elections in America been rigged
to slowly, but surely shift power to the right? In the secretive world of
voting machine companies, anything is possible.

The sad fact is that the
legitimacy of government in the United States will remain in question as long
as over 98% of the vote is tabulated by machines that can be easily rigged,
impossible to audit, and owned by a handful of private companies. Until we get
rid of those voting machines, democracy in America may be a distant memory.

Lynn Landes is a
freelance journalist specializing in environmental issues. She writes a weekly
column which is published on her website www.EcoTalk.organd reports environmental news for DUTV in Philadelphia, PA. Lynn's been
a radio show host and a regular commentator for a BBC radio program.